If Joe Biden really wants to restore the norms of constitutional democracy, he will back off his plans to make extravagant use of executive actions when he first takes the presidency. The first, most foolish idea he should abandon is his plan to suspend all illegal-immigrant deportations for the first 100 days.
The framers of the Constitution never intended presidents to rule by fiat. The first six presidents issued just 18 official executive orders in the first 40 years of the republic. Most were either on basic administration matters or were “proclamations” such as George Washington’s call for a national day of thanksgiving. Of course, much of this executive reticence was abandoned with the growth in the past 100 years of the administrative state. Still, it is only in the past few decades that presidents have tested the limits of executive orders and other directives in ways that amounted to making new policy on their own rather than merely administering duly passed legislation.
The practice of making end-runs around the ordinary congressional lawmaking process erodes the sense of legitimacy that regular legislation provides. Against the constitutional design, it aggregates far too much power in the executive branch and eliminates the need to seek compromise through legislative give-and-take.
Nonetheless, Biden and his team have signaled their intention to move aggressively using executive actions. He plans to have the United States rejoin the World Health Organization, even though the WHO has been corrupted by its obeisance to China, sometimes with deadly results. He likewise plans to rejoin the Paris climate accord, to which President Obama wrongly committed this nation without the ordinarily required treaty ratification by the Senate. Trump withdrew U.S. participation, but Biden again wants to ignore the Senate and reenlist for the accord’s punitive mandates that hold the U.S. to higher standards than China while harming the U.S. economy.
The worst idea, though, both in terms of being awful policy and in violating the president’s sworn duty to faithfully execute the laws, is Biden’s oft-repeated promise, some would see it as a threat, to suspend deportations for 100 days. This refusal to deport illegal immigrants is, to be blunt, lawless. As it is, the deportation process is ponderous, meaning that tens of thousands of immigrants whose illegality is not even in doubt remain for days, months, or even years within our country.
Plenty of safeguards are already in place to delay deportation for people with special circumstances. If Biden merely wanted to strengthen those safeguards, some of which were eroded by the Trump team, that would be reasonable. Instead, he wants to suspend all deportations. This requires much further explanation. What about those immigrants found to have broken not just our immigration laws but other, ordinary laws as well? Will those lawbreakers, too, get to remain here for 100 days? Why? What purpose would that serve?
Today’s political “progressives” have made a fetish of sanctifying illegal immigrants, treating them as victims rather than the scofflaws they are. Granted, there are plenty of reasonable policy disagreements involving “Dreamers” and other children of adult illegals. Still, the existence of some gray areas that might justify illegal residence should not justify widespread acceptance of, much less encouragement of, illegality. Yet Biden’s 100-day plan seems to apply greater respect and leniency to illegal aliens than even to actual citizens found violating our laws.
Biden should abandon this plan. And in general, he should use executive actions judiciously, rather than as a political cudgel to enact leftist policies he can’t otherwise convince elected representatives to adopt.
